In situational awareness, Leopold Aschenbrenner writes:
“Reports suggest OpenAI was at a $1B revenue run rate in August 2023, and a $2B revenue run rate in February 2024. That’s roughly a doubling every 6 months. If that trend holds, we should see a ~$10B annual run rate by late 2024/early 2025, even without pricing in a massive surge from any next-generation model.”
Since the revenue run rate is likely an important influence in decisions to invest in upcoming AI generations, this question asks when the $10B revenue run rate will be exceeded by OpenAI.
1,000https://www.tanayj.com/p/openai-and-anthropic-revenue-breakdown
“Revenue: OpenAI is at ~$3.6B in annualized run rate revenue as of August 2024, and was roughly at $1.6B in annualized run rate revenue near the tail end of 2023. Based on their projected total revenue of $3.7B for 2024, I estimate OpenAI ending 2024 at ~$5B-5.2B in annualized run rate revenue. This would represent a growth rate of 225% y/y from $1.6B at the end of last year. OpenAI also further projects to get to $11.6B in revenue in 2025, an increase of 213% y/y next year if they are able to achieve it.”
This is a hard one. OpenAI's revenue right now is at about $3bn and most of that revenue (~$2bn) is in the application (ChatGPT, ChatGPT Teams, ChatGPT Enterprise) as opposed to from the API.
Setting aside the fact that OpenAI's revenue run-rate doubling time has slowed (only grew by 50% over the last 6 months), OpenAI is may get competition from established players with distribution on its chat service (Google, Microsoft), and in terms of power-user functionality from Anthropic.
API revenue seems to be vulnerable, due to the ease of switching from one provider to another, and honestly, under what we would expect given the hype around AI (people are just not spending that much on API calls).
I think it's reasonable that they will continue their current growth rate and double every year, but that puts them in $10bn revenue range more like in the first half of 2026.